How business is leading the battle to solve global sanitation crisis

Unilever and Millennium Villages announce collaboration on Global Handwashing Day as Jeffrey Sachs accuses institutions of collective inaction over saving 600,000 lives a year

The importance of handwashing: 600,000 people die a year from infectious diseases that could, in part, be prevented by the simple act of washing hands or having access to a toilet. Photograph: Martin Godwin

While Baumgartner's daredevil exploit will live on only in the record books, 600,000 people continue to die a year from infectious diseases that could, in part, be prevented by the simple act of washing hands or having access to a toilet.

This human disaster was the subject of a debate I attended in New York with, among others, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Unilever CEO Paul Polman and Robert Orr, the United Nations assistant secretary general for policy co-ordination and strategic planning.

What was clear is that, while Global Handwashing Day may have helped raise public awareness in developing nations, it has failed to inspire the world's institutions and governments to act.

Sachs, who announced a partnership with Unilever and his Millennium Villages project to demonstrate the difference that hand washing can make, said the main glimmer of hope on the horizon is that some of the big multinationals are taking action and putting pressure on the UN and others to follow suit.

Sachs has been tasked by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to lead the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a new initiative which will mobilise scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable development problem solving. However, Sachs pulled no punches in his criticism of the UN, the World Bank and Unicef for their failure to take adequate steps to solve the crisis.

He said: "You need the UN to create scale and to create the public/private partnerships that actually make things work.

"But when it comes to safe water, sanitation and hygiene, we don't have the public side, we have the private side.

"The UN itself is a little bit in disarray because there are a dozen agencies that have water somehow associated with it and we have none on sanitation, to put it bluntly.

"I have been 12 years with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and sanitation is the biggest failure. There are a billion people in the world who will defecate in public today, not even in a hole, because they don't have a toilet or a place to wash their hands afterwards.

"UN agencies mainly promote knowledge about toilets, but not the toilets themselves, and people cannot afford the $100 slabs to make a latrine.

"The public sector needs to stand up and say 'we see what Unilever and Procter & Gamble are doing and see that there are partners in the private sector ready to lead'."

One piece of good news was that Sachs said that at a meeting last week with Ban Ki-moon and the MDG advocates, it had been "agreed that sanitation would go top of the list" of priorities.

However, he also made it clear the planned Sustainable Development Goals, which will replace the MDGs post-2015, would not include handwashing as a specific target "because then there will be 6,000 specific goals. It won't come at a high level because we need enough goals that a fifth grader can recite them.

"There is no way that on that list handwashing will make it. Ending poverty will make it, preserving the environment will make it but we need to do thousands of things that are really important."

Sachs said the key obstacle to progress was the lack of a funding source such as the GAVI Alliance or the Global Fund and accused the World Bank of failing to support the process of change.

He also offered up the possibility that Bill Gates may provide the first major financial support for water, sanitation and hygiene.

"We don't have a funding source for sanitation," he said. "If a country is in need of scaling up sanitation there is no place to turn. The World Bank is not the place you can approach, where you can actually get financing. You do not go to the bank for your toilet and this is why after 12 years we don't have toilets. It's a failure of mechanisms.

"Bill Gates is interested and he might start a fund which will partner on the WASH agenda which is really what we need and that may be the right answer as they are the biggest single funder in the world right now.

"The only other mechanism that is a thousand times better is the market but the problem is the markets do not reach people who don't have money."

Sachs also had this message for Unicef: "You are our lead on this in the UN system so scaling up has to be the call. Unicef does not have the money to support but you have a great brand to get the money."

Orr admitted that not much progress has been made in the last 100 years on sanitation, and that the issues were not costly to solve. But he did say that the UN's Every Woman Every Child movement has grown rapidly and "we are literally bending the curve on investment and lives saved of women and children," in part due to the involvement of the private sector.

"Business can do something that governments alone cannot do. The reach of business helps us get to the people that we try to reach. We know the solutions and business is there on innovation not just in products but in marketing and market development. Business is there on supply chains, Polman reaches parts of the world that we can't."

"Success in whatever area you are trying to make major changes depends upon making it a process of bidding each other up. Governments do more so business does more so therefore civil society does more. If we see a race to the top on something as simple as this, this is actually easy. Yes we need the money, yes we need the systems and political leadership but ultimately we need behaviour change on a mass scale. Make it cool, do it together and everyone will see success."

Polman defended the record of the UN and pointed out the importance the Secretary-General had placed on partnership in his second term in office.

"The Secretary-General is very smart and he could have been head of marketing for Unilever," quipped Polman. "His campaigns such as Energy for All and Every Women Every Child get the mind focussed. For business it is extremely helpful to link it to your business model and help create a critical mass."

He said the partnership with the Millennium Villages will encompass nearly 500,000 people in rural villages, across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and will support the company's goal to help more than one billion people take action to improve their health and wellbeing.

"The big issues the world is facing require new approaches, new business models and new partnerships," he said. "Responsible businesses must take a more active leadership role. Innovative partnerships between governments, civil society and business have a critical role to play in promoting better hygiene practices and in tackling the world's deadliest diseases."